Terra System
Reese's Galaxy
Star Command, Do You Even Respond?
In this week's entry we will be discussing the loved and despised Xbox 360. The Real MVP.
The Xbox 360 is a Microsoft product that succeeded it's predecessor, the Xbox, and allowed Microsoft to emerge as a serious player in the gaming industry. It came out in 2005 and competes primarily with the PlayStation3 and Nintendo Wii (bleh). It currently sits as the sixth-best selling system of all time, with a sales number of 84 million.
So what makes the 360 such an attractive piece of technology? For one, it has a simple design. It is flat and can fit almost anywhere, which is perfect for users who either want it to sit horizontally or stand vertically. If you have a space that needs filling, the 360 could probably fit. Secondly, it has an exhaustive array of games to select from. It has Halo 3, the best selling game of 2007 (and probably my favorite game of all time), as an exclusive title (meaning Sony couldn't have it on its POS3). It has all of the EA series of games like Battlefield, Madden, NHL, etc. It has the Gears of War and Left 4 Dead series, both highly successful franchises. Finally, it has Xbox Live at its disposal. Xbox Live is Microsoft's implementation of multiplayer gaming and interaction, and it's pretty dang great. The security of the infrastructure is quite high - servers don't get taken down ala Sony - and the multiplayer population is gigantic. There's currently 148 million Xbox Live members!
 |
| The glory hunter itself/ |
With that said, we have to investigate its shortcomings. There aren't many, but the ones it possesses are pretty severe. The Xbox 360 has a lot of usability problems regarding the "Red Ring of Death." When this occurs, your Xbox is kapeesh. This signifies hardware problems with more than one hardware component, and your Xbox won't even give you an error message. Additionally, the e74 error is pretty common as well. This error signifies a problem with the scaler chip in the Xbox. I've had this error and couldn't fix it...little did I know, Microsoft offers a three year warranty with each Xbox regarding this error as of April 2009. That would've helped me. Moreover, the overall failure rate of this system is expected to be about 23%. That's really high, especially for a system that represents such a big investment.
 |
| The Red Ring of Death. |
We haven't heard of such problems with the Xbox One, so we'll see how that ends up!
The Xbox 360. What memories I have with this thing. My parents had purchased the Xbox 360 for my brother and I as a gift. From that day on, my childhood had changed forever. I don't even want to know how many hours total I've wasted on it. Ehhh, maybe not wasted because they were all worth it. To add to that, I'm glad you talked about Halo 3. That game was my jam. My roommates and I actually chipped in and bought a few games for our 360 this year, Halo 3 being one of them. Speaking of it, I'm getting the urge to play a few multiplayer games right now.
ReplyDeleteI personally never had an Xbox, but my brother did. He loved it. He loved the software and the hardware. I did have opportunities to use it though. I have to say the UI was very intuitive to use most of the time. The system was not hard at all to get used to either, even though I was coming from a different console. I will say though, my biggest complaint was the controller. I know most people disagree with me, so maybe this is a personal experience. The controller was too bulky and heavy. It felt like it was too big and hard to maneuver. The non rechargeable batteries also made little sense to me. Why not have an internal rechargable battery that you charge by plugging it into the console? I am sure Microsoft had their reasons, but this makes it annoying to charge the controller and makes it heavier than it needs to be. All in all, a great console for what it is. However, PLAYSTATION MASTER RACE FOREVER!
ReplyDelete